Perception

Perception
Via David Amerland 

_Perception of how the world is formed and how we function within it hinges upon our own sense of inner balance. The Romans called this "gravitas" and prized it in their leaders. They felt that it gave a person a sense of rock-solid foundation in who he or she was and could therefore be relied upon to make better decisions because they were unlikely to be rattled. They sought to cultivate it in both private and public life and made it one of their sought-after virtues._

And from me.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

My first graduate seminar, while I was still an undergraduate, was a study of William Butler Yeats.

#perception   #control   #thesecondcoming   #williambutleryeats